If you have ever felt a gnawing unease rising from your daily experiences of the world,

If uncertainty does not let you elucidate the irrationality of life,

If you realize that the lucid, progressing world hides unfathomable chaos that constantly threatens the cozy construct you try to delude yourself into,

then A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson is your poison. A Collapse of Horses is a collection of horror stories that question the self’s ability to understand horror. These stories are not your run-of-the-mill Halloween scares. If anything, they are more tricks than treats.

Well before I had heard about Evenson’s fiction, I knew about the deceptions of life. Even more, I experienced them throughout the last twenty-one years of my existence: mental abuse underneath peoples’ comforting glances, an ex-partner’s unconditional love, and the hopes of redemption from a foreign land. Trying to make sense of life’s unpredictability has only proven the impotence of my perceptions; reality becomes more distorted as I cautiously pass each day.

A Collapse of Horses’s uncanny stories take the human psyche's unreliability to fascinating, sometimes excruciating, lengths. While each story is uniquely unnerving, there is a commonality: each relies greatly on the reader’s interpretation. In this design, the author questions our dependency on flawed human senses and blurs the line between actuality and assumption.

“What became of her was that she was in a room, or thought she was. Only the room at times had no walls and indeed seemed to breathe and flex from being a room to being, simply, the outside.”

In “Scour,” a woman gradually loses her sense of space as she draws near her death, confined to a room. At first, her captors strap her to a bed, feed her rations, and treat her frail health. Gradually, they increase her liberty. She is not strapped down anymore, and she’s allowed to walk around the room. Then, one day, the hallway door is unlocked. Suspicious, she suspects that her departure from the room might invite danger, so she waits without food or water, unable to muster enough courage to flee. She keeps on waiting, but she doesn’t know for what. She slips into delusion as her fragmented-self laments the impossibility of escape. Confined without confinement, the woman loses her sense of reality as the room is not the room anymore, but a metamorphic space that pushes her to ask,

“What can you do but wait?”

Early in my childhood, I once heard a story from my father about circus elephants. In the circus, the animal caretakers would bind an iron ring to one of the baby elephants' legs to make them submissive. As the baby would try to run away, the iron ring would wound its flesh. After a few years, the ring would be taken off its leg, but since the elephant remembers the pain it endured while trying to escape, it would not dare to do so again. Its freedom rarely makes any sense to it. When I asked my father what it meant, he simply answered, “You’ll know when you grow up.” As I matured into a teenager, I found myself in a failing relationship, with all its infamy. It struck me with earnest blows. My then-girlfriend would frequently break up with me only to return after a few days to patch things up. The usual statement was that she loved me, so we should resolve our issues while we had the chance. It was a hypnotizing loop chewing on my soul. I was too hopeful, too emotionally dependent. A break-up was not a break-up, but rather, the waiting for her to return to me. I grew up. My father was right.

“I saw horses lying in the dirt, seemingly dead. They couldn’t be dead, could they? I looked to see if I could tell if they were breathing and found I could not. I could not say honestly if they were dead or alive, and I still cannot say.”

In the title story, a man lies recovering in his home for days after a dreadful accident. He gradually succumbs to confusion as it seems that his surroundings are changing. His room feels newly decorated each day, and the number of his sons varies. When he takes an idle walk outside one day, he finds some horses lying on the ground as if they are dead. However, he concludes that they’re neither dead nor alive — something he cannot understand, something standing outside his plane of reality. What sense to make of this encounter is up to the reader, but this ambivalent understanding is what best represents the core philosophy of Evenson’s psychological horror.

“Either horse or house, either house or horse—but what sort of choice was that really? ...I came to feel, by going out to avoid the house and finding the horses I had, in a matter of speaking, simply found the house again.”

It was 2019 when I was at the lowest point of my life. In Bangladesh, the twelfth-grade final exam is a public test that demands you show your expertise by painfully consuming eight-hundred pages of lessons, practicing for each science subject, and then vomiting the theories and applications back onto the test. I was vomiting, indeed, from the unmanageable pressure that resulted in repetitive panic attacks. The loss of appetite did not help. With academics pressing down on my sanity, I became Evenson’s frail horse, lying on the bed with an absent stare at the ceiling. My parents saw a dead-living mummy. To them, the horror was not understanding what was happening to their son.

In a similar design, Evenson shows that horror is not the demon inside the closet. It is not what lurks under your bed, crawls behind you with extended limbs, or dances in a mirror. It is, rather, the inability to confirm any entity that Evenson’s horror builds upon. The author uses the culpability in small details to transmute the larger narratives of life.

“And so, late at night, listening to her husband breathing beside her, one arm already tingling, sleep refusing to come, she found herself imagining what it would be like to be in bed with a man who had not one arm, but two.”

In “Torpor,” the unnamed protagonist is plagued by sleep deprivation. She used to sleep well when both her hands were placed on her sleeping husband’s arm. One day, her husband comes back with an amputated limb after an accident, and the woman is in distress because there is no longer an arm to place her hands as she sleeps. She experiences insomnia for months. This eventually leads her to engage in an affair with someone who has two hands. The fact that a simple hand discomfort can result in such vicissitude of life proves that even the simplest factors can cause titanic changes in life. Horror scares the security of self, forcing one to take measures that defy sanity. In all its strangeness, Evenson’s horror is the reality that pushes you to struggle with the choices you make.

“As he perhaps dozed a little, she would stealthily slip on her splints and then, carefully, place both her hands on him. And then, finally, if he didn’t move, if he didn’t mind having her there pressing on him, then she, at last, would once again be able to sleep.”

I arrived in the United States in 2023. After two previous visa rejections followed by one last attempt, it initially felt like a triumph. Being the only child of my parents, however, it was difficult to bid them farewell. But the bigger challenge was adapting to a new environment, which I hardly considered before leaving my home country. Upon arriving in Idaho, reality presented itself with all its infamy. After the first night of sleep, I had severe body aches. My neck was sore, my limbs numb, my back a pathetic mess. I had never slept on such a soft mattress and pillows. My head would sink in, and my body would jump vigorously whenever I switched sides. In Bangladesh, the pillows are hard, the mattress harder, and life the hardest. The smooth comfort of a developed country requires adapting to it. I spent countless nights either sleep-deprived or half-asleep in neck pain. At a certain point, I started using hardcover books under the pillow to save my cerebral headquarters. I remembered a proverb my mother would say: “A street dog can’t digest delicacies.” Everything was alien and some things were pathetic.

“But do your worst: disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me. If you can make that happen, I think we both agree, then anything is possible.”

A Collapse of Horses is a sanctuary for human bewilderment and incomprehension. The horses should stand, they should traverse the terrains of your secured understanding. But sometimes, their strength is compromised. Each story is all about missing the point. No one is supposed to elucidate, and no one is supposed to find objectivity. As a result, life, real or surreal, becomes an eraser’s softly brushed blur in which we throw ourselves in dismay.